Mathura takes Holi more seriously than almost anywhere else in India, and for good reason — this is where the festival’s stories are said to have first played out. What starts as a religious observance by mid-morning has, by afternoon, turned into thousands of handfuls of coloured powder thrown into the air at once, forming brief, glowing clouds that hang for a second before drifting down onto everyone underneath.
Getting this frame meant standing inside the throw zone with the camera wrapped in a plastic bag, waiting for a cloud dense enough to catch the light but thin enough to still show a human silhouette moving through it. Most attempts just returned a wall of pink. This one, for about a quarter of a second, didn’t.
By evening the colour is everywhere — on walls, in hair, worked permanently into the grout between paving stones — a kind of temporary tattoo the whole town wears for a week afterward.
